Despite the computational ability of modern compute devices, certain tasks such as speech detection and recognition remain challenging. There has been significant progress with word recognition using phoneme recognition, hidden Markov models, deep learning, and similar techniques. Such techniques are particularly effective for recognizing words and short statements.
One aspect of speech recognition that remains challenging for compute devices is determining the boundaries between sentences. One approach is to end a sentence whenever there is a pause or silence, but such approaches will not recognize a boundary between sentences that are not separated by a silence, and will add a boundary if there is a pause that is not between sentences, both of which are common in naturally-spoken sentences.